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Flawless PS4 pushes developers

The PS4 is giving developers a whole lot more freedom to run with their ideas, but has forced others to sprint to catch up.

Michiel Van Der Leeuw, the technical director at Guerilla Games who is currently working on PS4 launch title Killzone: Shadow Fall, told Videogamer.com the upcoming console is so well-designed there are no inefficiencies.

“The fact that the best pieces of hardware are also devised from, or optimised versions of, the stuff we find in PCs doesn’t make it any less a console.

"A PC is a number of parts that also [have] bridges in-between, where there are inefficiencies that may [come in if they’re not] exactly the right match.”

Apparently those inefficiencies don’t exist in the PS4.

“We’ve got the right amount of memory, video card; everything’s balanced out. It was a very conscious effort to make sure that – with the speed of the memory, the amount of complete units, the speed of the hard drive – there would not be any bottlenecks,” continues Van Der Leeuw.

“I think it was for more than a year that we knew the main ingredients and there was just discussion after discussion trying to find a bottleneck.

"Take a look at this design; try to find the bottleneck.”

Meanwhile, over at Evolution Studios development on DriveClub is underway also, but technical director Scott Kirkland says living in “PS3 land” for such a long time is forcing them to play catch up for the new console.

“With it being a very contemporary GPU core, [there’s] a whole bunch of new graphics features probably familiar to PC developers, but we’ve spent a lot of time in PS3 land, so we had to play catch-up on some of those great things like texture varieties, hardware instancing, volume textures, tessellation, texture compression,” he says.

“They’re all really cool features that we’re leveraging in all sorts of interesting ways.”

So far so good by the sounds of things for the upcoming console release, however it’s early days yet and anything could happen before the console’s expected launch later this year.